A follow-up to the book "Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism and Science Exposed!" by Robert Todd Carroll, creator of The Skeptic's Dictionary. The blog will offer irregular postings about cognitive biases, logical fallacies, and illusions.

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Monday, January 21, 2013

bias blind spot

The bias blind spot was described by Princeton University psychologist Emily Pronin and her colleagues (2002) as the tendency to perceive cognitive and motivational biases much more in others than in oneself. The bias blind spot is a metabias since it refers to a pattern of inaccurate judgment in reasoning about cognitive biases.

In one study, Pronin et al. (2002) found that people tend to rate themselves as less subject to biases than others. In another study, “participants … who showed better-than-average bias” were instructed in how biases operate at the unconscious level. Nevertheless, 63% insisted that their self-assessments were accurate and objective. Better-than-average bias is the tendency of individuals to rank themselves as better than average on just about anything you ask them.
For example, 74% of all managers think they are better than average at
managing. (As Dilbert’s boss noted: this means that 26% of managers
don’t know that they’re better than average. To which Dilbert replied: you’re all in the top 110%. See Scott Adams's cartoon for January 18, 2013.)

Participants in another study “reported their peer’s self-serving attributions regarding test performance to be biased but their own similarly self-serving attributions to be free of bias.”

In another study, Pronin and Matthew Kugler (2006) argue that the bias blind spot “involves the value that people place, and believe they should place, on introspective information (relative to behavioral information) when assessing bias in themselves versus others. Participants considered introspective information more than behavioral information for assessing bias in themselves, but not others.” A consequence of the bias blind spot is that people tend to think their own beliefs are accurate and their sources trustworthy, but those who hold different views are biased and their sources are not trustworthy (Ehrlinger et al. 2005).

Finally, a study by Richard West et al. (2012) found that “being free of the bias blind spot does not help a person avoid the actual classic cognitive biases.” They also found that higher cognitive ability did not correlate with a smaller bias blind spot. (Note: West et al. did not find that “smarter people are more vulnerable to these thinking errors,” as Jonah Lehrer claimed in a New Yorker article [“Why Smart People Are Stupid,” June 12, 2012]. In fact, the opposite is true: Most cognitive biases are negatively correlated with cognitive sophistication, as West et al. note in their article.)

19 comments:

The bias blind spot is the cognitive bias of failing to compensate for one's own cognitive biases. The term was created by Emily Pronin, a social psychologist from Princeton University's Department of Psychology, with colleagues Daniel Lin and Lee Ross.The bias blind spot is named after the visual blind spot.

“Blindspot” is a metaphor to capture that portion of the mind that houses hidden biases. The authors use it to ask about the extent to which social groups – without our awareness or conscious control – shape our likes and dislikes, our judgments about people’s character, abilities, and potential.

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